A Boston Yankee buys a "sports car"

Feature Article from Hemmings Sports & Exotic Car

Throughout my entire childhood and young adulthood, it appeared that my father
was in the lead for the title of America's Most Boring Dad. While my friends' dads were getting divorces, shacking up with young chicks, quitting jobs and driving sports cars, my dad was going to work at the same time every morning, with a brown paper bag containing his lunch, wearing a business suit that was constructed of a polyester that had to be the forerunner of modern Kevlar.
Since he worked at Sears, we either bought stuff a) from Sears, b) that was as durable as a double knee or c) that had the same return policy as a Craftsman tool. At a very young age, as a defense mechanism, I developed an iron skin. I had no choice when all of my classmates were wearing Nike Waffle Trainers and Levis, and I was clad in plaid Toughskins and a stylin' pair of orange and blue Winner II runners from the Sears catalog. I had one of those cotton jackets that all the kids wore, with team names emblazoned on baseballs. But since Sears was too cheap to pay license fees to any of the real teams, the teams listed on my jacket were the "Beantown Red Socks" or the "New York Yankeys."
My dad's taste in cars wasn't any more adventurous than his choice of attire. He chose durability over style, function over form. I thought we'd turned a corner in late 1976, when our 1970 Impala pooped out a few miles from English Chevrolet in Haverhill, Massachusetts, and he decided on a whim that he was going to buy a Camaro. I was apoplectic. After years of ignominy, my father would be driving a Rally Sport, or maybe--God help me--a Z/28. But a week later, he rolled into the driveway in a leftover 1976 Sport Coupe, with a 250-cu.in. six, an automatic, no air and clad in a shade of yellow I can only describe as baby-food banana. Shopping cart hubcaps, vinyl interior and an AM radio rounded out the package.
I know it stemmed from the fact that both my parents had lived through the worst of the Great Depression. Those years left an indelible scar on people of my parents' generation. It was tough on everyone, but when you were dirt poor to begin with, life was one daily Sisyphean slog after another, and you did your best not to spend money on foolish things.
But in stark opposition to this conservative nature, deep down, my dad was a real bohemian. When he left the Navy shortly following World War II, he went to art school. He was something of a Renaissance man: a photographer, a painter, a writer and an illustrator.
When they moved back to Massachusetts in the early 1950s, his bohemian side spilled over into the lobe of his brain that controlled car purchases. He was taking figure-drawing classes from an enormous, kind-hearted, bald-headed black man named Charlie Haig. Charlie had an Austin-Healey 100, and as long as my father lived, he thought that if you wanted to cut a really dashing figure, you drove an Austin-Healey. But his meager paycheck and his Yankee thriftiness kept him from pulling the trigger on one of the more expensive brands.
Instead, he bought a Nash Metropolitan convertible. It said "Austin" on the valve cover, so I guess he convinced himself that he'd be driving a car just like Charlie's. Sort of like when he convinced me that plaid Toughskins were just like Levis.
For several years, my parents would put their two Siamese cats on the back deck and drive from their apartment on Beacon Hill--now swanky, then skanky--five and a half hours up to Acadia National Park in Maine, and he hated every minute of it. It was an ungainly, silly looking, completely unreliable and slow car, and it was a disappointment from day one. My mom thought it was cute, though. And my dad was the kind of a fellow who would grit his teeth and press on in a tenacious unwillingness to admit he'd made a mistake, like the time we suffered through two years of burnt toast because he'd splurged on a chrome toaster that would either barely warm a piece of bread or irradiate it back to the Stone Age.
The final straw for the Met really wasn't the car's fault. A neighbor cleaning the windows of her sixth floor window lost her grip on one of the screens and it crashed through the car's roof. She paid for the damages, and with that check, my dad saw his exit plan from the world of foreign cars. From there on out, it was one plain vanilla American car after another for the next 35 years.
I still have a picture of my mom in the Met, and when I think of my dad, I always put him in a big Healey, whether he got to enjoy one or not.

This article originally appeared in the September, 2006 issue of Hemmings Sports & Exotic Car.